► My installation, titled Fraktured Homeland, is a tribute to the fraktur. By translating it into a different material and releasing it from the confines…
(more)

▼ My installation, titled Fraktured Homeland, is a tribute to the fraktur. By translating it into a different material and releasing it from the confines of the two dimensional page, I seek to breathe new life into the space of the fraktur, moving the tradition forward.
Advisors/Committee Members: Scott Chamberlin, Kim Dickey, JeanneQuinn.

► This is Laura Zelda Smith's MFA thesis paper. (footnote: Ok, this is a joke. This is what we all secretly want to type in…
(more)

▼ This is Laura Zelda Smith's MFA thesis paper. (footnote: Ok, this is a joke. This is what we all secretly want to type in for the abstract of our papers, and is essentially a one to two sentence summation of my paper. However, a more appropriate abstract would say: my paper discusses my relationship to both materiality and performance. The paper, itself, is designed to be an artistic work in its own right, and playfully perform a running commentary on its own material and process.)Advisors/Committee Members: Kim Dickey, JeanneQuinn, Scott Chamberlin, Michael Beitz.

► My thesis project Splitting Water with Wood is an installation consisting of a handmade boat and projected video of a durational performance that engaged…
(more)

▼ My thesis project Splitting Water with Wood is an installation consisting of a handmade boat and projected video of a durational performance that engaged the boat in unconventional ways. Throughout the project and paper, I employ conceptions of faith as a crucial lens to begin to understand my current body of work; a handcrafted boat as an exploratory apparatus, the labor surrounding it as an act of devotion, and a resulting performance that experiments with ideas about baptism. By challenging presupposed notions of how a boat traditionally functions, I rely on the lively materiality of the object and its environment to capture and extract previously unforeseen possibilities. It considers the do-it-yourself lineage in my family and how that history of fabricating, constructing, and repairing informs me as an artist. Splitting Water with Wood draws on personal stories of my past and reimagines them as new narratives to explore the many facets of my Midwestern roots and provides insight to myself as a maker.
Advisors/Committee Members: JeanneQuinn, Yumi Roth, Alvin Gregario, Erin Espelie.

► The fear of navigating the world begins with advice received as young girls: never walk alone at night, always inspect the back seat of…
(more)

▼ The fear of navigating the world begins with advice received as young girls: never walk alone at night, always inspect the back seat of your vehicle for intruders, carry your keys between your fingers. Over time women accumulate experiences that confirm the validity of that advice, experiences that become a burden felt within the body. Women learn to expect violence, to occupy their body differently, and to navigate space based on that expectation. Tied in Knots documents an ongoing performance using kitchen knives to knit an aimless and endless strand. The repetition becomes an engrained compulsion and form of muscle memory, similar to the ritualistic actions undertaken by women to avoid a potential threat.
Advisors/Committee Members: Alvin Gregorio, Mike Womack, Marina Kassianadou, JeanneQuinn.

► Human languages are complex, sociocultural systems. Languages are preserved and disseminated by acts of speaking and writing. This is also the manner by which…
(more)

▼ Human languages are complex, sociocultural systems. Languages are preserved and disseminated by acts of speaking and writing. This is also the manner by which communication and expression evolve. The design of this project is to explore the intricate relationships between language, writing and the self. The passages in this document include select authors and collections of my own reflections upon the symbols and sounds that enable us to communicate, think and define ourselves.
Advisors/Committee Members: Kim Dickey, George Rivera, JeanneQuinn, Scott Chamberlin.

► I like to think of my work as being more culturally diverse than I am. In my artwork, I am creating an alternate reality…
(more)

▼ I like to think of my work as being more culturally diverse than I am. In my artwork, I am creating an alternate reality that mimics the process of how I think and feel when exploring. The objects are created from both real and imagined experiences. Reality becomes blurred when one can't distinguish between what's real and what's created, or what's truth and what's fiction. This body of work is rooted in four close family traditions:
• Money Wash depicts the ritual of washing my hands in money every New Years
Day.
• Rhododendron evokes the memory of having my photograph taken by my
grandfather in front of the springtime bloom each year.
• Peony is reminiscent of the passing on of a peony bush from generation to
generation.
• Pierogiwas inspired by the annual practice of making and eating pierogi with my
father's family on Christmas Eve.
Exploring these traditions allowed me to find imagery and motifs that are meaningful to me, and allowed the plants, flowers, bushes, money, and food to be transformed into ornamentation and decoration. From there, the work travels. Each piece is a collection of cultural inspirations, imageries, and forms.
Advisors/Committee Members: Scott Chamberlin, Kim Dickey, JeanneQuinn, Alvin Gregorio.

► This thesis is a written supplement to the work presented in the 2012 MFA Thesis Exhibition. The paper addresses topics that drive and contextualize…
(more)

▼ This thesis is a written supplement to the work presented in the 2012 MFA Thesis Exhibition. The paper addresses topics that drive and contextualize the work.
Artist Statement
In fire there is passion, possibility and transformation.
I find beauty in my embarrassment.
I welcome the silly.
If the objects I make want a rat-tail, like a boy, I let them have it.
Advisors/Committee Members: Scott Chamberlin, Kim Dickey, JeanneQuinn, Alvin Gregorio.

► My romantic life, at once tender and desperate, is the substance of my work. More specifically, I am interested in the ways that I…
(more)

▼ My romantic life, at once tender and desperate, is the substance of my work. More specifically, I am interested in the ways that I project and receive desire (as Roland Barthes said, "I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy"), and negotiate my own relative experiences within it. This endless exchange between lovers - the absences, the expectations, the gravities, the intimacies, the small catastrophes - is the realm into which I want to invite viewers.
The act of making parallels the act of living. This is the heart of my work. It is in the everyday experiences, most of the time mundane, that I find evidence of a lovers presents or absence such as lint, left over food, or rolling over onto an empty, warm part of the bed. I find myself wanting to know what it would be like to experience those fleeting subtleties forever, what I perceive to be the details of love.
Process and material are the tangible means by which I contemplate my experience and emotion. I use clay because it relies on touch to mold shape; I can make it look like anything. I often use plaster molds for its ability to mimic or replicate an object that is perceived as everyday. From there I transform the objects through surface decoration and arrangement. I am interested in creating sculptures that are visually and sensually provocative. It is through texture, sheen, and craft that create this initial compulsion for the viewer. I want the viewer to wonder what the object insight feels like to touch; the initial pondering I experienced for the cultivation of the piece itself.
Advisors/Committee Members: JeanneQuinn, Kim Dickey, Scott Chamberlin, Alvin Gregorio.

► How does one elucidate the burden of their personal and cultural history? The concept of culture is a vast and at times opaque circumstance…
(more)

▼ How does one elucidate the burden of their personal and cultural history? The concept of culture is a vast and at times opaque circumstance of human existence rooted in centuries of tradition and ritual. How can I, as an American artist, understand my sense of individuality and freedom within the ethnic milieu of Jewish history? Researching the foundation of my relationship to Jewish culture and making art in response has provided a sense of transparency and levity to a previously obstructed aspect of my identity.
Although I am three generations removed, the legacy of the Holocaust manifested itself through occurrences in my childhood, encounters with media, and in the development of my personal psychology. With this in mind, I am in the process commemorating Jewish American culture, as I understand it. This process involves creating a series of hand-built ceramic sculptures based on exaggerated interactions I have had with my family and re-interpreted moments found in popular culture. As I mythologize my personal history through creating ceramic objects, a physical home is constructed for my personal narrative and the narrative of American Jewish culture to which I am inextricably linked.
This process is a discovery of imagery, language, icons and characteristics that are particular to Jews in America. I utilize metaphors and narrative in recreating seemingly mundane objects such as a tube of Cortisone cream, a bunch of bananas, a UPS shirt as well more obvious Jewish representations like a menorah, a loaf of challah and a tallis. This work celebrates these tropes as objects, while examining their role in contemporary society.
My work and my family, though laden with grief and humor, are transparent and joyous. My identity and my family, though laden with grief and humor, are transparent and joyous. My identity and my studio practice are enmeshed into one organism. This tangled entity obscures my outlook and buries me into the earth with my ancestors. Through the rare gift of seeing this force in its totality, I observe that despite its gravity and power, it never is, never was, and never could be.
Advisors/Committee Members: JeanneQuinn, Scott Chamberlin, Eli Sacks, Kirk Ambrose.

► When I am making work I am trying to be as honest as I can, sometimes to an uncomfortable degree. I explore truths of…
(more)

▼ When I am making work I am trying to be as honest as I can, sometimes to an uncomfortable degree. I explore truths of the human condition so that there may be humor, sarcasm, love, discomfort, and struggle present in the work. Language plays a huge role in my research and practice. The written and spoken word is vital to misunderstanding one another, it confuses and frustrates more than any other language. This thesis addresses the work in Love Notes: I Don't Care if it Kills You, and how it is concerned with communication and inequality in partnership.
Advisors/Committee Members: Kim Dickey, JeanneQuinn, Scott Chamberlin, Julie Carr.

► The thesis installation, Mata Sueños / Dream Killer, recalls the atmosphere of a birthday party. It also presents a surrogate for the anxiety and…
(more)

▼ The thesis installation, Mata Sueños / Dream Killer, recalls the atmosphere of a birthday party. It also presents a surrogate for the anxiety and fear that permeates the experience of undocumented and mixed-status families living in the United States. As a person born into these circumstances, I reorient this celebration to bring attention to the looming possibility of removal. My installation suggests what remains hidden within domestic spaces. Upon close observation, the handmade paper decorations that adorn the room reveal that they are obsessively bitten. These decorations form an engulfing mass, one that is both familiar and surreal. Together with audio and video, the installation documents time and presence, even when absence seems imminent.
Advisors/Committee Members: Scott Chamberlin, Kim Dickey, JeanneQuinn.

► My thesis work and this paper explore the implications of making the theoretical physical. I made an installation comprised of three large sculptures with…
(more)

▼ My thesis work and this paper explore the implications of making the theoretical physical. I made an installation comprised of three large sculptures with accompanying wall pieces. The shape of the sculptures is determined by a family of mathematical formulas that vary by two parameters. By making mathematical forms out of physical materials, I give the work as well as the concepts behind them agency, as well as a bodily connection to the maker and the viewer. They become a physical proof of ideas and concepts previously explored theoretically.
Advisors/Committee Members: JeanneQuinn, Kim Dickey, Scott Chamberlin.

▼ M/Other spaces examines the thesis work, a projected video installation titled Skin, to elucidate my artistic practice and aesthetic philosophy. The second part of the thesis paper traces my pursuit of the question, "Why is it so damn hard to be an artist and a mother?"
My methodology begins with using the embodied-experience as a source of knowledge. Existential phenomenology asserts that sensory stimulation is a primal way of knowing, preceding the influence of judgment and translation of experience into abstract constructions of knowledge. I explore what truths can be known from bodily experience, and I'm interested in the sites of conflict where the body is oppressed, constricted, or discomforted by the man-made environment.
Through my research, I have found the historical and theoretical basis that helps explain my experience and desire to make work centered around institutional critique and social practice. Using psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, and existential phenomenology, I argue that it is necessary to acknowledge the continued affect of a gender hierarchy in the collective unconscious and its residual effect on the production of women artists.
The expression and expectation of the egocentrism of the artist and the self-sacrifice of the mother has affected every aspect of my artistic practice. My research has led to an understanding of the nature of the artist-mother as a dichotomy, in which the exertion of one suppresses the expression of the other. My thesis work reflects my reconciliation between the two schizophrenic identities and a newfound agency in my artistic practice.
Advisors/Committee Members: Alvin Gregorio, Richard Saxton, Melinda Barlow, Erin Espelie, JeanneQuinn.

► In this thesis, I address the questions and issues that are central to my work as an artist. I discuss my primary motivations in…
(more)

▼ In this thesis, I address the questions and issues that are central to my work as an artist. I discuss my primary motivations in the creation of this project, along with an explanation of the process that led to its completion. I provide historical context for work, including specific references to artists, movements, and writers that have been influential. In addition, I consider the current cultural climate and social backdrop in which this work exists. The themes and subjects that are addressed will continue to inform my practice in the years to come.
Advisors/Committee Members: Francoise Duresse, Melinda Barlow, Mike Womack, JeanneQuinn, Alvin Gregorio.

► My work explores notions of vulnerability, self-awareness and perception. I am interested in how the body explores space through the use of auditory, optical…
(more)

▼ My work explores notions of vulnerability, self-awareness and perception. I am interested in how the body explores space through the use of auditory, optical and kinetic devices. Spectator participation is an important element in this installation. In order to exploit human desire to have a relationship with things, the objects that I construct are made to promote intimacy and approachability. Fabrics, colors and forms, inspired by the fashion and musical motion pictures of the 1930s, are chosen specifically to entice the spectator into the role of participant. This installation is a social experiment of sorts, a mediated experience to explore and challenge expectation through play.
Advisors/Committee Members: JeanneQuinn, Scott Chamberlin, Kim Dickey, Yumi Roth.

► As a viewer, I find that I rarely consider the gallery or museum as the final home for artwork. I always imagine the home…
(more)

▼ As a viewer, I find that I rarely consider the gallery or museum as the final home for artwork. I always imagine the home to which the pieces might belong. What role does the artwork play in the daily life of the owner? Understanding this tendency to see artwork as related to the domestic environment has allowed me to better understand my motivation to make functional ceramics. I have designed this exhibition to be viewed in a gallery, but ultimately envision it to be used, viewed and enjoyed in the home. It is designed to hang on the wall as one might hang a painting but is then removed, used and returned to the wall. My appropriation of baroque and chinoiserie patterns on the surface of my work as well as my use of traditional methods to make my forms results in objects that simultaneously embrace the history of ceramics and the decorative arts.
Advisors/Committee Members: Kim Dickey, Scott Chamberlin, JeanneQuinn, Yumi Roth.